The positive cohomology groups of a finite group acting on a ring vanish when the ring has a norm one element. In this note we give explicit homotopies on the level of cochains when the group is cyclic, which allows us to express any cocycle of a cyclic group as the coboundary of an explicit cochain. The formulas in this note are closely related to the effective problems considered in previous joint work with Eli Aljadeff.

Let $G$ be a finitely generated, infinite group, let $p>1$, and let $L^p(G)$ denote the Banach space $\{ \sum_{x\in G} a_xx \mid \sum_{x\in G} |a_x |^p < \infty \}$. In this paper we will study the first cohomology group of $G$ with coefficients in $L^p(G)$, and the first reduced $L^p$-cohomology space of $G$. Most of our results will be for a class of groups that contains all finitely generated, infinite nilpotent groups.